These status alerts are critical indicators of drive degradation. "Caution" implies that the drive has unstable sectors or is showing early signs of wear, suggesting you should be vigilant. "Bad" is a severe warning that critical thresholds have been surpassed and the drive is likely to fail soon. In either case, immediate data backup is strongly advised to prevent data loss.
This is due to a firmware limitation found in certain older Maxtor hard drives. The internal usage timer rolls over after approximately 1,092 hours (65,535 minutes). Consequently, the "Power On Hours" displayed in the software may appear significantly lower than the actual usage time because it has reset multiple times.
The "Unknown" status occurs because the standard ATA protocol for reporting buffer size is limited to 32 MB. Many modern drives feature cache sizes much larger than this limit. As a result, manufacturers often leave this field blank or provide non-standard data, which CrystalDiskInfo displays as "Unknown."
The ability to report "Rotation Rate" was introduced in the ATA8-ACS specification. Drives manufactured before this standard, as well as many Solid State Drives (SSDs) which have no moving parts, do not support this feature. Therefore, CrystalDiskInfo cannot retrieve or display a rotation speed for these devices.
This message typically appears when drives are connected via a controller that CrystalDiskInfo does not support. While most internal SATA/IDE and USB drives are supported, drives configured in RAID arrays or connected through specific external RAID controllers might not be detected by the software.
These specific Samsung drive models have a known firmware issue where accessing S.M.A.R.T. data can lead to data loss. As a safety precaution, CrystalDiskInfo blocks access to these drives by default. It is recommended to apply the official firmware patch from the manufacturer to fix the underlying issue.